Lisa Traiger has been an arts writer since 1985. Currently she contributes to The Washington Post Weekend section On Stage page. She was a freelance dance critic for The Washington Post Style section from 1997-2006. Her pieces on the cultural and performing arts appear regularly in the Washington Jewish Week and on DanceViewTimes.com. She has written for Washingtonian, Moment magazine, The Forward, Dance Magazine, Pointe, Stagebill, Sondheim Review, Asian Week, the Boston Jewish Advocate, the Atlanta Jewish Times, Washington City Paper and Washington Review. A first-place recipient of the 2007 Maryland-Delaware-DC Press Association award for arts and entertainment writing, Traiger also received two Simon Rockower Awards for Excellence in Arts Criticism from the American Jewish Press Association. She earned an M.F.A. in choreogr! aphy from the University of Maryland, College Park and holds B.A.s in English and Dance. As a New York Times Fellow, Traiger participated in the Institute for Dance Criticism at the American Dance Festival in Durham, N.C. A board member of the Dance Critics Association from 1991-93, she returned to the board from 2005 to 2008, and served as its co-president during the 2006-07 season. Traiger currently serves on the advisory board of the Dance Notation Bureau. e-mail lisatraiger@aol.com
The year 1939 was pivotal for Jews of Europe -- and the world at large. Within months of Kristallnacht and the 1938 Anschluss, World War II and the Nazi project to eradicate the Jews of Europe swept the continent.
On America's shores, 1939 was the year Hollywood reached a cultural peak, producing movies like Stagecoach, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, The Wizard of Oz and the epic Gone With the Wind.
That two plays, 1997's The Last Night of Ballyhoo, by Southern Jewish writer Alfred Uhry (of Driving Miss Daisy fame), and playwright/director Robert O'Hara's world premiere Antebellum this year, take as their premise the Atlanta movie premiere of Gone With the Wind and the Nazi rise to dominance, makes a curiosity into a minor phenomenon.
While both are family living room dramas, Uhry's play has a gothic Southern charm in the way it delves into the desire of the German-Jewish Freitag family to marry off their less-than-desirable daughter as rumblings of war disrupt plans for the genteel Southern dance -- Ballyhoo -- during the famed GWTW premiere.
O'Hara pushes his script, a diptych that plays out in Atlanta and Berlin, into murkier waters in its first showing at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company in the District. Sarah Roca (a prim Jenna Sokolowski) is indeed a genteel Southern Reform Jewish lady, prepared for Atlanta's social event of the season, a plantation ball following the movie premiere.
But with the arrival of an outsider, Edna Black Rock, plans go awry. Even with her buttery Southern accent, Edna (a gracious, but steely Jessica Frances Dukes) is not what she seems even as she tries to insinuate herself into the Roca household, a nice Jewish home reeking of faded pre-Civil War ignominy as a reputed slave plantation.
Tony Cizek's grand classic columns and windows, with murky trees behind, lend an air of lost glory to the surroundings. On the other side of the ocean, Nazi commandant Oskar von Schleicher and African American cabaret singer Gabriel Gift play out a master-slave relationship that hinges on Gift's otherness as a black man caught in Nazi Germany. Andrew Price's Schleicher, with his German accent and icy demeanor, lords over the gentle, aching character Gift, played by Carlton Byrd.
O'Hara challenges his audience to rethink their ideas about racism and sexuality in these evolving relationships. As the couples connect and reconnect in the play's second act (no spoilers here to dampen the surprise factor), viewers must grapple with ideas of what it means to be a Jew or a black man in Nazi Germany and how similar or different that sense of other plays out in the American Deep South.
Identity isn't what it seems, O'Hara suggests, but it ultimately becomes the hinge that opens floodgates on a shocker of an ending. While there are moments of high comedy -- picture prim Sarah Roca in a garish hooped ball gown of her own design -- the playwright is after the shock factor with an overwhelming wash of emotion as revelations and mismatched identities reach soap operatic heights.
That said, O'Hara deals bluntly and boldly with the Nazi propaganda of the degenerate Negro and the South's own history of unrepentant racism and lynchings of black and Jew alike. As the Jewish man who navigates both these territories, Ariel Roca (a subdued Nick Vienna) becomes the linchpin that sets the forces of history into motion on a path of destruction.
For viewers who may take offense at full frontal nudity, alternative lifestyles and violence on stage, Antebellum isn't the right choice. For those intrigued by a work that toggles between two outwardly dissimilar worlds -- prewar Berlin and post-Civil War Georgia -- Antebellum offers a wild and typically Woolly ride with the expected edginess that defines artistic director Howard Shalwitz's taste. Antebellum is not your grandmother's Southern gothic; it's raw, ribald and not for the faint of heart.
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Antebellum is onstage through April 26 at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company in the District. Tickets, $26-$60, are available by calling 202-393-3939 or at www.woollymammoth.net .
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